Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:30:46 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Building servers this weekend. Recommendations? Message-ID: <201111132231.PAA10188@lariat.net>
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> Don't know why you would go with 9.0 on a new server I understand what you're saying: normally, we wouldn't use a .0 release in production. But there's a problem. 8.2-RELEASE has serious networking bugs that would cause the servers to lock up. It also has a few other problems (e.g. in timekeeping) that we have seen to cause instability. A small number of these are fixed in 8.2-STABLE (but to use it we'd not only have to build our own unique snapshot but create a machine to build it on). Other problems have been fixed in 9.0-STABLE but have not been backported, perhaps due to the push to get 9.0 out the door. Some will likely never be backported, either because they represent ABI or architectural changes or because the developers' energies are focused on not one but two newer branches. And we need the servers now. See our dilemma? IMHO, this problem stems from moving between major version numbers too quickly rather than having at least 5 or 6 releases on each major branch, leaving the last one or two highly polished so that no one feels compelled to use a .0 release in production. While it probably isn't a good idea to do more than 5 or 6 releases on a branch, it does result in unparalleled stability. (Witness 4.11, which may have been the highest quality release in FreeBSD's history.) Using an official "RC2" build still wouldn't be ideal, because freebsd-update couldn't be used to do a binary upgrade to the release. (We'd still need to cvsup and "make world" on production machines, which we do not like to do.) But at least we wouldn't have to tweak configuration files, and would only have to rebuild those application binaries that were statically linked. So far, it seems like the best option, but I'd be interested in other suggestions. --Brett Glass
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